Bartholmew Fair by Ben Jonson

Abstract

reference, Reibetanz would have done better to stick to his comment that King Lear “decimates attempts at reduction” (p. 119). The solecism does not invalidate the intended truth. The questions raised in this book are not intellectually demanding, and they could have been discussed in simple and unpretentious English. But more strenuous attention is needed to follow it than to read, for example, Bertrand Russell on the philosophy of Kant. This is because Reibetanz sometimes writes in a jargon in which abstraction is piled on abstraction until the mind boggles: Shakespeare has indeed presented us in this play with a great stage of fools. His moriae encomium complements the play’s affinity to a tradition of morally polarized characters, and reinforces its effect by defining that opposition from another perspective, (p. 107) In this welter of abstractions the little word “its” seems lost; does it refer to “encomium,” to “affinity,” or to “tradition” ? The text is also liberally sprin­ kled with Latinisms, many of them unnecessary, like “ab ovo,” “sui generis,” “reductio,” so that one is tempted to exclaim with Dull: “ ’Twas not a hand credo, ’twas a pricket.” The general rule of contemporary academic prose seems to be to prefer the recondite to the familiar, the abstract to the con­ crete, the foreign word to the English, the specialist term to the common expression. It is a pity that a book which places Shakespeare’s play in the context of the dramatic art of its time, and which offers a number of valuable insights, should have been partly written in this style. Ge o ffrey durrant / University of British Columbia Ben Jonson, Bartholmew Fair, ed. G. R. Hibbard (London: Ernest Benn; New York: W. W. Norton, 1977). xxvi, 180 This is a particularly welcome edition of a famous, wonderful play by the man who is surely the best living scholar in Canada of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama. We have already benefited greatly from his several volumes in the New Penguin Shakespeare, including Coriolanus, The Taming of the Shrew, and The Merry Wives, the introductions to which plays are among the very best. That Hibbard’s Bartholmew Fair not only is superior to most other New Mermaids, but is also one of the best editions of a Jonson play in any series is therefore not surprising. Moreover, it is fitting that this play should have been edited by a scholar in Canada, for in recent years Canadians have made it very much their play: William Blissett, Guy Hamel, Joel Kap­ lan, and R. Brian Parker have all written excellent essays on it, duly listed under “Further Reading” in Hibbard’s edition. 364 Because we know that Jonson normally took great care in the publication of his works, most of them present editors with relatively few problems. But the original version of Bartholmew Fair is a messy text, full of errors, many of them obvious misprints, but others of them puzzling. There are missing words, obviously wrong words, probably missing lines, and the printer almost totally ignored Jonson’s own careful punctuation, substituting his own in erratic fashion, often careless of whether a full-stop or comma was required. Even in a modernized text, an editor of Jonson will usually want to retain most of Jonson’s punctuation, but in the case of Bartholmew Fair he must strictly provide his own. Hibbard of course benefited a great deal from the editions by Herford and Simpson, E. A. Horsman in the Revels Plays, and Eugene Waith in the Yale Ben Jonson. But his text at a fair number of points differs from them, and usually convincingly. At several points Hibbard’s text improves upon Horsman’s, while for other passages the two texts provide interesting alternative possibilities as to what Jonson actually wrote. At ii.ii.no, Hibbard emends Folio’s “winne out wonders” (followed except for modernizing by Horsman) to “wind out wonders,” and tells us in his note that while no sensible parallel for “win out” has been found, “wind out,” a hunting term, suits a play rich in animal and other hunting imagery. More daring but less persuasive is his emendation at m.v.21 from “a young pimp...